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24 May 2014 - 18 Jul 2014
A horrible plague has befallen your world. In a desperate search for the cure, one person has been sent to what is suspected is an alien research facility. Deep within the bowels of the planet, past hordes of monsters and unknown technology, lies the cure. Maybe.
I love roguelikes. This one is no exception.
The reason I stopped this series is two-fold. One, no one was watching (not exactly a huge deal). Two, this wasn't the type of progress I was exactly proud of or capable of doing in a quick manner. It could take up to ten episodes before I could successfully reach the end - if I reached the end at all. More typically, I would end up dead, killed by a droid somewhere on the upper levels.
There does seem to be a huge disparity between the difficulty levels. I could successfully traipse through the dungeon on Easy mode, but one step up totally slaughtered me. Off-camera, I tried Hard, and got creamed as soon as I stepped off the ladder on the second floor.
What's funny is that there's an achievement for managing to die on the first floor, and yet I couldn't seem to manage to do that, even on purpose. Even after multiple tries. So there's some kind of balancing that's going on behind the scenes; I just don't know what.
And that's the main crux of the problem, I think. I'm not very good at puzzling out all the intricacies of these kinds of games, and roguelikes have a lot of intricacies. There's a whole lot of numbers being crunched behind the scenes that I don't fully understand, mainly because I have, at best, a mainstream understanding of statistics (that is, none at all). If I'm told something has a 90% chance of success, I expect it to succeed, flat out. I know, mentally, that it also means that there's a 10% chance of failure, and it's even statistically probable (though unlikely) that something with a 90% chance of success could fail four times out of five - because it's just *those* five, not the five million test cases it would take to actually work out a proper statistical percentage. I know, mentally, that it's a classic case of observer bias. But I will still take it personally when a 90% chance fails, every time.
That's just an example. The game is full of percentages: hit chance, failure chance, lockpicking, hacking, crafting, and on and on and on. A lot of the game is just a roll of the dice.
But that's also not true.
Yes, OK, some of the game is chance. But a lot of the game is playing with those chances, making it so the odds are in your favour, and having some kind of plan for when things inevitably go wrong. You can liken it to poker: between a high-level poker player and a mediocre one, the high-level one will win most of the hands. Not because they get better cards, but because of their experience with the game.
I don't have that kind of experience.
I love roguelikes. But I also cheat in most of them. When I played Rogue, way back in the day, I would save-scum to my heart's content. It wasn't about gaming the system, or even so much about playing the game as it was designed; it was all about getting to the end.
That's the way I play most games, I think. I play to the conclusion of the story, and then I stop. If something really interests me, I might complete a few of the sidequests, or maybe even start the whole thing over to play again. But most of the time, I'll just stop playing. I reached the end, I made sure that the world was saved; why play more?
So maybe I don't really love roguelikes. I like the idea of an infinite, procedural death labyrinth (as Northernlion has coined). Set in a world I enjoy, that I can go back to again and again to beat up bad guys in a variety of ways. But maybe I'd do better if it was, say, a first-person shooter. If there were less numbers behind the scenes, juggling percentages. If I could more easily identify a single point and say, "If I do this instead of that, I would see a glimpse of success."
I don't really get that in roguelikes. It can usually be a long, slow spiral to the bottom, with no completely clear picture of where things really started to slide downhill. And then, like a avalanche, everything comes crumbling down, you're at 10 HP, surrounded by hostile droids, with two bullets left, and no hope.
Play it.
I know, it seems like a strange recommendation. But if you like roguelikes, if you're good at them, and you take enjoyment at playing them, this is one you shouldn't pass up. It helps that the setting is pretty well developed, with a lot of call-backs to the original 4x game. Go for it. You only have a million lives to lose.